Things sensitive to heat more likely to fail during the warmer part of the year? Whodathunkit!
But I guess that the REAL question is - How do these numbers correlate to increased incidents of broken limbs during the winter months? Could it be that by breaking your computer you are appeasing the Gods of Breaking and so your arms and legs remain whole, and vice versa?
I think that there surely is room for further research here and that we should immediately start to break some arms and legs. Starting with persons responsible for TFA.
"The wall was made higher, additional barbed wire was installed, security measures were tightened," said City Councilor Augustus "Jun" Pe, "but why was the inmate still able to escape?"
They've also tried putting onions in his path. That didn't work either.
If you ask the Department of Public Services (DPS), there was no way a man could be smuggled in the thin layer of trash that day without being noticed. They said he would have surely collapsed from the stench of food slop collected from the jail. But a convicted prisoner, who is due to be shipped out to the National Bilibid Prison in Muntinglupa, would surely find the will to endure a ride that smells to the high heavens.
Obviously, some caffeinated magnet-shrooms are needed (to stop them going over and under the defenses) along with some strategically placed winter melons and maybe a cactus somewhere.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual states that Starfleet PADDs are powered by sarium krellide power cells, and have an outer casing of boronite whisker epoxy, which would allow the PADD to sustain a 35-meter drop without damage.
Basically, you could use a PADD as a hammer and still write your report on it later.
Doctor was signing and giving away PADDs loaded with a hologram of him singing in Virtuoso. And you can often see characters using several PADDs when researching something - as one would do with notepads as opposed to what one might do with a notebook.
Only USA-ians and Indians (dots, not feathers) actually get paid. Everyone else gets amazon.com gift certificates. Meaning that they get paid in CDs/DVDs and books as amazon.com does not deliver most other items outside of USA. Intriguing option only if you have loads of free time, no credit card and possessing a thirst for cultural artifacts like books, movies and music. I.e. - if you are an underage second- or third-world kid.
As a result from such paying practice most Indian workers on mTurk today are "employed" by sweatshops, churning out mostly worthless HITs. Many of them are probably just copy/paste or random-click scripts.
One of the reasons the problem attracts so much attention is the consequences of the answer. A proof that P = NP could have stunning practical consequences, if the proof leads to efficient methods for solving some of the important problems in NP. It is also possible that a proof would not lead directly to efficient methods, perhaps if the proof is non-constructive, or the size of the bounding polynomial is too big to be efficient in practice. The consequences, both positive and negative, arise since various NP-complete problems are fundamental in many fields.
Cryptography, for example, relies on certain problems being difficult. A constructive and efficient solution to the NP-complete problem 3-SAT would break many existing cryptosystems such as Public-key cryptography, used for economic transactions over the internet, and Triple DES, used for transactions between banks. These would need to be modified or replaced.
On the other hand, there are enormous positive consequences that would follow from rendering tractable many currently mathematically intractable problems. For instance, many problems in operations research are NP-complete, such as some types of integer programming, and the travelling salesman problem, to name two of the most famous examples. Efficient solutions to these problems would have enormous implications for logistics. Many other important problems, such as some problems in protein structure prediction are also NP-complete;[15] if these problems were efficiently solvable it could spur considerable advances in biology.
But such changes may pale in significance compared to the revolution an efficient method for solving NP-complete problems would cause in mathematics itself. According to Stephen Cook,[4]...it would transform mathematics by allowing a computer to find a formal proof of any theorem which has a proof of a reasonable length, since formal proofs can easily be recognized in polynomial time. Example problems may well include all of the CMI prize problems.
Research mathematicians spend their careers trying to prove theorems, and some proofs have taken decades or even centuries to find after problems have been stated - for instance, Fermat's Last Theorem took over three centuries to prove. A method that is guaranteed to find proofs to theorems, should one exist of a "reasonable" size, would essentially end this struggle.
A proof that showed that P NP, while lacking the practical computational benefits of a proof that P = NP, would also represent a very significant advance in computational complexity theory and provide guidance for future research. It would allow one to show in a formal way that many common problems cannot be solved efficiently, so that the attention of researchers can be focused on partial solutions or solutions to other problems. Due to widespread belief in P NP, much of this focusing of research has already taken place.[16]
If you tilt your laptop back a little too far you're likely to snap the damn thing off in the plug. They're also really unbalanced so tilting your screen back too far will cause your laptop to topple backwards.
It's the mythical 40" screen laptop with the sub-notebook base! Its ginormous cathode screen makes it unbalanced to the traditionally heavier laptop base that holds 95% of laptop's hardware! My god, what were they thinking when they were making it?!
Even the smaller laptops are bulky and don't fit well in backpacks or messenger bags. They fit neatly into bags because they don't have oddly shaped bottom panels that catch on things. I'm putting it into or pulling it out of a bag a hundred times a week.
Here's a CRAAAAZYYY idea!
Next time, buy a bag for your laptop that matches your LAPTOP - not your shoes. That might help with the pulling-out, putting-in part.
3 colors == greater precision than 2. You know, like traffic lights. And you can't really create gradients from single LED light sources situated at the same spot. You might do that by putting the LEDs on opposite sides of the balloon, adding voltage control, wiring...
I.e. making it unnecessarily more complicated, with the additional "bonus" of making the reading of the pollution levels unreadable. Ever notice how most human-readable non-alphanumeric indicators don't come graded in gradients ranging from -256 to +256?
By the way, why are the balloons in one spot different colors? Does this thing actually work properly?
Each balloon is attached to a sensor for a single pollutant, which then lights up in different colors depending on the concentration of the pollutant which is being measured.
If we treated child porn as a virus then the only people left who would have large collections of child porn would be the individuals who actually like child porn.
Obviously, you have never been asked by a friend/colleague/distant relative/person you've just met in the supermarket/someone who knows someone you've went to elementary school with/a guy that just happens to speak the same language as you (sort of)/someone claiming to be an actual human being on an internet forum somewhere - to "fix their computer" or "clean the viruses from it".
Gray-skinned men have been a part of the space program from the beginning.
And just what kind of backward barbarian species would still have "gender"? DISGUSTING! What is next? You reproduce through sex and divide your society according to geographical features?
...women were not allowed to vote and not being white was often a dangerous pastime activity.
Or to put it differently, Founding Fathers and their successors have been proven shortsighted or just plain wrong 12 times in the past 100 years. Also, about a bajilion things happened during that time.
Actual application for this is in the interfaces for the handicapped. The game is there just to point out how "easy" it is to use.
Personally, I find the interface a bit... unsettling. And the use of Mario is simply sacriligious. Using Mario like that. He did no harm to anyone. Well... except Bowser and his minions. But they were all bad.
I'm hearing that there are already calls to increase the frame rate to at least 30 fps for digital 3-D because certain camera moves, especially pans, look jumpy in 3-D. I saw that in the Imax 3-D "Beowulf." You've been an advocate for both 3-D and higher frame rates. Have you seen the problem and do you have any thoughts on it?
For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it's like you're standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It's like you never saw it before, when in fact it's been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Some people call it judder, others strobing. I call it annoying. It's also easily fixed, because the stereo renaissance is enabled by digital cinema, and digital cinema supplies the answer to the strobing problem.
The DLP chip in our current generation of digital projectors can currently run up to 144 frames per second, and they are still being improved. The maximum data rate currently supports stereo at 24 frames per second or 2-D at 48 frames per second. So right now, today, we could be shooting 2-D movies at 48 frames and running them at that speed. This alone would make 2-D movies look astonishingly clear and sharp, at very little extra cost, with equipment that's already installed or being installed.
Increasing the data-handling capacity of the projectors and servers is not a big deal, if there is demand. I've run tests on 48 frame per second stereo and it is stunning. The cameras can do it, the projectors can (with a small modification) do it. So why aren't we doing it, as an industry?
Because people have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second... with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won't. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don't solve them at all.
If every single digital theater was perceived by the audience as being equivalent to Imax or Showscan in image quality, which is readily achievable with off-the-shelf technology now, running at higher frame rates, then isn't that the same kind of marketing hook as 3-D itself? Something you can't get at home. An aspect of the film that you can't pirate.
Other than that, for digital 3-D, would you rather see energy going into moving from 2K to 4K, or into moving from 24 fps to 48 or 72 fps, and why?
4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080x1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema? Which ignores the fact that the social situation is entirely different, and that the cinema screen is 100 times larger in area. So they somehow hit on 4K, which people should remember is not twice the amount of picture data, it is four times the data. Meaning servers need to be four times the capacity, as does the delivery pipe to the theater, etc.
But 4K doesn't solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA e
Spoken like someone who has never passed through the same street as someone who created a work of art. Even a bad work of art.
Technique is (in most cases) not art in itself, but it is what is necessary to create a rhythm and a beat from what is simply "banging on the drums". That is why there are such things as art academies and art teachers that teach art lessons in such establishments. 90% perspiration and all that. Very, very, very, VERY few people are natural talents born with both skill and (for the lack of the better word) soul for creating that elusive combination of conditions in their work we like to refer to as "art". Others can be taught to harness what they already have, or to improve it or even to fake that they have it. And in the long run, even those that fake it might stumble into making "art". The "artist" that created those new photos has no technique nor sense of art - all he has is technology. And he shows that he can't even use that properly.
Oh and... If content is EVERYTHING as you say - where is the content in the new photos? Old ones have it. New ones on the other hand... They are so utterly devoid of any content or purpose that he could have just as well used the default Windows backgrounds to create those... Photoshop disasters.
Despite the lack of technical skill, the artist achieved the goal of having me feel that I was standing in another's shoes.
I am guessing here, but I am quite certain that you were actually moved by the original art and authenticity of the old photos he picked for their "power".
Kinda like how an old song sung by an "American Idol" star doesn't get better - it was good to begin with. At best, it will be "OK". At worst... well... And it works the same way for "professionals" too.
And no amount of hardware can make an artist out of a hack. Particularly not a tablet in this case. To fix those, one would need to use some actual elbow grease PLUS something the "artist" clearly lacks - the eye of a photographer. Cause those photos he used are not photographs. Those are snapshots.
Not a single impressive point in any of them. They are completely expressionless and "dead". Why? Cause he was taking photos of dead things - buildings. Whoever was taking those old photos was taking photos of living people. Living people doing "important things". Meaningful things. Things worth being preserved for posterity.
In the new photos people are there simply by accident. Utterly meaningless and completely unmotivated. Those photos don't contrast - they clash.
The problem is that the fading between the two photos seems haphazard. I understand that the point of the photos is to show the contrast between the two time periods. As such, you want it to be clear that there are two photos being overlaid. However it just looks weird to have, for example, people be half-erased. The artist could have instead defined a blending edge that didn't cut across any people (or cars, etc.) so that each sub-region of the image looked fully-formed and thus more real. I think this would have made the effect more powerful.
Those have both an artistic AND journalistic feel to them. The fact that you see the hand holding the photo actually connects you the viewer (cause it is seen from your perspective - as if it is your own hand), the person taking the photo (cause he/she is right there in the photo) and the location in both past and present.
The way those photos in the article are done now the final result just seems lazy. Slap two photos of the same location one on top of the other, and then run around the edges with an eraser tool. Ta-DAH!
No skill, no art - just a gimmick that was old back in the '90s.
Slashdot Mirror
Things sensitive to heat more likely to fail during the warmer part of the year? Whodathunkit!
But I guess that the REAL question is - How do these numbers correlate to increased incidents of broken limbs during the winter months?
Could it be that by breaking your computer you are appeasing the Gods of Breaking and so your arms and legs remain whole, and vice versa?
I think that there surely is room for further research here and that we should immediately start to break some arms and legs.
Starting with persons responsible for TFA.
"The wall was made higher, additional barbed wire was installed, security measures were tightened," said City Councilor Augustus "Jun" Pe, "but why was the inmate still able to escape?"
They've also tried putting onions in his path. That didn't work either.
If you ask the Department of Public Services (DPS), there was no way a man could be smuggled in the thin layer of trash that day without being noticed.
They said he would have surely collapsed from the stench of food slop collected from the jail.
But a convicted prisoner, who is due to be shipped out to the National Bilibid Prison in Muntinglupa, would surely find the will to endure a ride that smells to the high heavens.
Obviously, some caffeinated magnet-shrooms are needed (to stop them going over and under the defenses) along with some strategically placed winter melons and maybe a cactus somewhere.
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Padd#General_Specifications
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual states that Starfleet PADDs are powered by sarium krellide power cells, and have an outer casing of boronite whisker epoxy, which would allow the PADD to sustain a 35-meter drop without damage.
Basically, you could use a PADD as a hammer and still write your report on it later.
They were more like paper cheap.
Doctor was signing and giving away PADDs loaded with a hologram of him singing in Virtuoso.
And you can often see characters using several PADDs when researching something - as one would do with notepads as opposed to what one might do with a notebook.
Or to put that in more words - what we have today is no longer what we used to call Discovery Channel.
Whatsoever and all that.
Unless they are from India.
Only USA-ians and Indians (dots, not feathers) actually get paid. Everyone else gets amazon.com gift certificates.
Meaning that they get paid in CDs/DVDs and books as amazon.com does not deliver most other items outside of USA.
Intriguing option only if you have loads of free time, no credit card and possessing a thirst for cultural artifacts like books, movies and music.
I.e. - if you are an underage second- or third-world kid.
As a result from such paying practice most Indian workers on mTurk today are "employed" by sweatshops, churning out mostly worthless HITs.
Many of them are probably just copy/paste or random-click scripts.
You won't be making any actual money in Montevideo from mTurk either.
Money is paid to USA and Indian workers only. Everyone else gets to use their earnings as gift certificates at amazon.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem#Consequences_of_proof
Consequences of proof
One of the reasons the problem attracts so much attention is the consequences of the answer. A proof that P = NP could have stunning practical consequences, if the proof leads to efficient methods for solving some of the important problems in NP. It is also possible that a proof would not lead directly to efficient methods, perhaps if the proof is non-constructive, or the size of the bounding polynomial is too big to be efficient in practice. The consequences, both positive and negative, arise since various NP-complete problems are fundamental in many fields.
Cryptography, for example, relies on certain problems being difficult. A constructive and efficient solution to the NP-complete problem 3-SAT would break many existing cryptosystems such as Public-key cryptography, used for economic transactions over the internet, and Triple DES, used for transactions between banks. These would need to be modified or replaced.
On the other hand, there are enormous positive consequences that would follow from rendering tractable many currently mathematically intractable problems. For instance, many problems in operations research are NP-complete, such as some types of integer programming, and the travelling salesman problem, to name two of the most famous examples. Efficient solutions to these problems would have enormous implications for logistics. Many other important problems, such as some problems in protein structure prediction are also NP-complete;[15] if these problems were efficiently solvable it could spur considerable advances in biology.
But such changes may pale in significance compared to the revolution an efficient method for solving NP-complete problems would cause in mathematics itself. According to Stephen Cook,[4] ...it would transform mathematics by allowing a computer to find a formal proof of any theorem which has a proof of a reasonable length, since formal proofs can easily be recognized in polynomial time. Example problems may well include all of the CMI prize problems.
Research mathematicians spend their careers trying to prove theorems, and some proofs have taken decades or even centuries to find after problems have been stated - for instance, Fermat's Last Theorem took over three centuries to prove. A method that is guaranteed to find proofs to theorems, should one exist of a "reasonable" size, would essentially end this struggle.
A proof that showed that P NP, while lacking the practical computational benefits of a proof that P = NP, would also represent a very significant advance in computational complexity theory and provide guidance for future research. It would allow one to show in a formal way that many common problems cannot be solved efficiently, so that the attention of researchers can be focused on partial solutions or solutions to other problems. Due to widespread belief in P NP, much of this focusing of research has already taken place.[16]
If you tilt your laptop back a little too far you're likely to snap the damn thing off in the plug.
They're also really unbalanced so tilting your screen back too far will cause your laptop to topple backwards.
It's the mythical 40" screen laptop with the sub-notebook base!
Its ginormous cathode screen makes it unbalanced to the traditionally heavier laptop base that holds 95% of laptop's hardware!
My god, what were they thinking when they were making it?!
Even the smaller laptops are bulky and don't fit well in backpacks or messenger bags.
They fit neatly into bags because they don't have oddly shaped bottom panels that catch on things.
I'm putting it into or pulling it out of a bag a hundred times a week.
Here's a CRAAAAZYYY idea!
Next time, buy a bag for your laptop that matches your LAPTOP - not your shoes.
That might help with the pulling-out, putting-in part.
3 colors == greater precision than 2. You know, like traffic lights.
And you can't really create gradients from single LED light sources situated at the same spot.
You might do that by putting the LEDs on opposite sides of the balloon, adding voltage control, wiring...
I.e. making it unnecessarily more complicated, with the additional "bonus" of making the reading of the pollution levels unreadable.
Ever notice how most human-readable non-alphanumeric indicators don't come graded in gradients ranging from -256 to +256?
By the way, why are the balloons in one spot different colors? Does this thing actually work properly?
Each balloon is attached to a sensor for a single pollutant, which then lights up in different colors depending on the concentration of the pollutant which is being measured.
Only if it is produced by Apple.
If we treated child porn as a virus then the only people left who would have large collections of child porn would be the individuals who actually like child porn.
Obviously, you have never been asked by a friend/colleague/distant relative/person you've just met in the supermarket/someone who knows someone you've went to elementary school with/a guy that just happens to speak the same language as you (sort of)/someone claiming to be an actual human being on an internet forum somewhere - to "fix their computer" or "clean the viruses from it".
Just what kind of computer nerd ARE you?
And their subliminal programing.
Wrong war, wrong country, wrong army branch.
On a side note, A Very Long Engagement also deals with that subject.
In a COMPLETELY different way.
Gray-skinned men have been a part of the space program from the beginning.
And just what kind of backward barbarian species would still have "gender"? DISGUSTING!
What is next? You reproduce through sex and divide your society according to geographical features?
I.e. those soldiers and pilots who would refuse to fight.
It involves a squad of soldiers armed with rifles and a brick wall.
Blindfolds were optional.
...goodbye.
...women were not allowed to vote and not being white was often a dangerous pastime activity.
Or to put it differently, Founding Fathers and their successors have been proven shortsighted or just plain wrong 12 times in the past 100 years.
Also, about a bajilion things happened during that time.
Actual application for this is in the interfaces for the handicapped.
The game is there just to point out how "easy" it is to use.
Personally, I find the interface a bit... unsettling.
And the use of Mario is simply sacriligious.
Using Mario like that. He did no harm to anyone.
Well... except Bowser and his minions. But they were all bad.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1
I'm hearing that there are already calls to increase the frame rate to at least 30 fps for digital 3-D because certain camera moves, especially pans, look jumpy in 3-D. I saw that in the Imax 3-D "Beowulf." You've been an advocate for both 3-D and higher frame rates. Have you seen the problem and do you have any thoughts on it?
For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it's like you're standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It's like you never saw it before, when in fact it's been hiding in plain sight the whole time. Some people call it judder, others strobing. I call it annoying. It's also easily fixed, because the stereo renaissance is enabled by digital cinema, and digital cinema supplies the answer to the strobing problem.
The DLP chip in our current generation of digital projectors can currently run up to 144 frames per second, and they are still being improved. The maximum data rate currently supports stereo at 24 frames per second or 2-D at 48 frames per second. So right now, today, we could be shooting 2-D movies at 48 frames and running them at that speed. This alone would make 2-D movies look astonishingly clear and sharp, at very little extra cost, with equipment that's already installed or being installed.
Increasing the data-handling capacity of the projectors and servers is not a big deal, if there is demand. I've run tests on 48 frame per second stereo and it is stunning. The cameras can do it, the projectors can (with a small modification) do it. So why aren't we doing it, as an industry?
Because people have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second ... with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won't. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don't solve them at all.
If every single digital theater was perceived by the audience as being equivalent to Imax or Showscan in image quality, which is readily achievable with off-the-shelf technology now, running at higher frame rates, then isn't that the same kind of marketing hook as 3-D itself? Something you can't get at home. An aspect of the film that you can't pirate.
Other than that, for digital 3-D, would you rather see energy going into moving from 2K to 4K, or into moving from 24 fps to 48 or 72 fps, and why?
4K is a concept born in fear. When the studios were looking at converting to digital cinemas, they were afraid of change, and searched for reasons not to do it. One reason they hit upon was that if people were buying HD monitors for the home, with 1080x1920 resolution, and that was virtually the same as the 2K standard being proposed, then why would people go to the cinema? Which ignores the fact that the social situation is entirely different, and that the cinema screen is 100 times larger in area. So they somehow hit on 4K, which people should remember is not twice the amount of picture data, it is four times the data. Meaning servers need to be four times the capacity, as does the delivery pipe to the theater, etc.
But 4K doesn't solve the curse of 24 frames per second. In fact it tends to stand in the way of the solutions to that more fundamental problem. The NBA e
You just put one of the polarized lenses in front of the camera and shoot though that.
Which will result in a video that will be even more blurry and darker than usually.
Plus, you lose the 3D aspect which was kindofa the point for going after the version shown in theaters instead of waiting for the DVD(rip).
Spoken like someone who has never passed through the same street as someone who created a work of art. Even a bad work of art.
Technique is (in most cases) not art in itself, but it is what is necessary to create a rhythm and a beat from what is simply "banging on the drums".
That is why there are such things as art academies and art teachers that teach art lessons in such establishments. 90% perspiration and all that.
Very, very, very, VERY few people are natural talents born with both skill and (for the lack of the better word) soul for creating that elusive combination of conditions in their work we like to refer to as "art".
Others can be taught to harness what they already have, or to improve it or even to fake that they have it.
And in the long run, even those that fake it might stumble into making "art".
The "artist" that created those new photos has no technique nor sense of art - all he has is technology.
And he shows that he can't even use that properly.
Oh and...
If content is EVERYTHING as you say - where is the content in the new photos?
Old ones have it. New ones on the other hand...
They are so utterly devoid of any content or purpose that he could have just as well used the default Windows backgrounds to create those... Photoshop disasters.
Despite the lack of technical skill, the artist achieved the goal of having me feel that I was standing in another's shoes.
I am guessing here, but I am quite certain that you were actually moved by the original art and authenticity of the old photos he picked for their "power".
Kinda like how an old song sung by an "American Idol" star doesn't get better - it was good to begin with. At best, it will be "OK". At worst... well...
And it works the same way for "professionals" too.
And no amount of hardware can make an artist out of a hack. Particularly not a tablet in this case.
To fix those, one would need to use some actual elbow grease PLUS something the "artist" clearly lacks - the eye of a photographer.
Cause those photos he used are not photographs. Those are snapshots.
Not a single impressive point in any of them. They are completely expressionless and "dead".
Why? Cause he was taking photos of dead things - buildings. Whoever was taking those old photos was taking photos of living people.
Living people doing "important things". Meaningful things. Things worth being preserved for posterity.
In the new photos people are there simply by accident. Utterly meaningless and completely unmotivated.
Those photos don't contrast - they clash.
The problem is that the fading between the two photos seems haphazard. I understand that the point of the photos is to show the contrast between the two time periods. As such, you want it to be clear that there are two photos being overlaid. However it just looks weird to have, for example, people be half-erased. The artist could have instead defined a blending edge that didn't cut across any people (or cars, etc.) so that each sub-region of the image looked fully-formed and thus more real. I think this would have made the effect more powerful.
Exactly!
Almost any one of those "then and now" photos where people hold up an old photo of a location while taking a photo of it now beat this collection in every aspect possible.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinflower/3611307186/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uwgbadmissions/3947916581/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/uwgbadmissions/3768986885/in/set-72157621758292209/
Those have both an artistic AND journalistic feel to them.
The fact that you see the hand holding the photo actually connects you the viewer (cause it is seen from your perspective - as if it is your own hand), the person taking the photo (cause he/she is right there in the photo) and the location in both past and present.
The way those photos in the article are done now the final result just seems lazy.
Slap two photos of the same location one on top of the other, and then run around the edges with an eraser tool. Ta-DAH!
No skill, no art - just a gimmick that was old back in the '90s.